The Evolution of Marketing Operations with Anna Bruning

Years ago, someone would look at you like you were from Mars if you said the words “marketing operations.” Today, that terminology is still evolving, but the role is more important than ever.

Marketing operations professionals are charged with monitoring, measuring, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing initiatives as they relate to the overall company’s goals. HubSpot Blog

In working with some of our clients, we see that the role extends beyond the standard “Ops” responsibilities. Not only does Marketing Operations drive the technical day-to-day, it often serves as the glue between Marketing and Sales. Professionals in the role work closely with Sales and Marketing, and make sure that the teams are aligned in order to drive success in their jobs.

When IDC first started its surveys of marketing spend and staffing back in 2003, Marketing Operations wasn’t even on the job roster at most organizations. Today, the “MO” role represents about 6.5% of the total staff and it is the fourth largest job “category” for a large marketing department. Technology Marketing Blog

We see that smaller companies usually assign “the tech guy” to drive marketing operations (even though the title may be something else). Larger companies have teams that work together to run the role. The responsibilities may not look like a lot in writing, but the role helps set the foundation for marketing success. You need to have an analytical mind in order to hold this type of job, and this is exactly what Anna Bruning has.

An Interview with Anna Bruning, Marketing Operations at Dyn

Watch the interview here.

Anna Bruning, who runs marketing operations at Dyn, joins us today. She shares some insights on her everyday life in this position:

  • Anna’s Day-to Day Activities at Dyn: “I am the Marketing Operations Analyst. It really covers everything marketing operations.”
    • Sales Team. “I am managing our Marketo instance and I work closely with our Sales team to make sure that the leads are getting into the right place.”
    • Marketing Team. “I work with our Marketing team actualizing all of their marketing campaign ideas.”
    • Leadership. “And then I’m working with Leadership on tying all of that together, and looking at the analytics in order to make the business decisions that we need to ‘red light’ or ‘green light’ different projects.”
  • What are the big challenges that you see on a day-to-day basis? What are the things that keep you up at night? “There are so many different challenges and projects. I would say that an overarching one is data maintenance and data cleanliness.”
  • Data Cleanliness. “We have leads coming in from a number of different sources and making sure that we have the right information on them; and that any bad data is getting cleaned up so we know what we’re looking at is really accurate and represents what’s going into our Sales team.”
  • Over the last year, what do you think has been a big success? “The biggest success for marketing ops has been analytics. In the past year, we’ve really transformed how we’re looking at data, and this is the first time we’ve had the data we need to make important business decisions. It’s really driven a good alignment between Sales and Marketing, and marketing ops has really driven that discussion, that conversation.”
  • Better Visibility. “It helps us pinpoint different choke points in our funnel and really make sure we’re focusing our energy in the right way.”
  • Look out over the next year, where do you see your technology and how it’s going to solve your problems at Dyn? “We are working more and more to really personalize our engagement with our leads.”
    • Nurturing.  “Nurturing is kind of the big thing we’re working on in 2015 and engagement. Making sure that based on the different personas we are dealing with, we are really flexible in having a two-way conversation. So, using Marketo and a number of other tools to make sure that our engagement is two-way and adaptable.”

You can follow Anna on Twitter at https://twitter.com/annawbruning

The post The Evolution of Marketing Operations with Anna Bruning appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.

Jeff Coveney

Jeff Coveney

Jeff Coveney is an accomplished marketing expert with more than 20 years success in generating demand and creating buzz for leading technology organizations. Previously, Coveney redefined the demand generation process at Application Security with the implementation of a state-of-the-art marketing automation system leveraging Marketo. Coveney’s programs helped Application Security earn a 2013 Marketo Exceptional Product Usage nomination. Marketo also honored Coveney as one of the world’s top 50 Marketo professionals by naming him to the 2013 Marketo Champion Elite class. Prior to joining Digital Pi, Coveney founded RevEngine Marketing, a marketing automation consulting firm helping companies accelerate leads through the marketing funnel in a repeatable and measurable way. Most recently, Jeff joined Digital Pi as EVP of Marketing where he continues to strategize marketing engagement strategies for both clients and the agency.
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